Halloween at School

As every American knows, Halloween is celebrated every year on October 31st, which is this Saturday. Halloween is a new idea for the Taiwanese, but they seem to be catching on quickly and are quite amused by the whole ordeal.

For the past two weeks, I have been teaching a Halloween class for all of my second graders. I start off by showing them a short movie clip from the "Nightmare before Christmas" to give them some visual idea of where we are going. Then I use a powerpoint to teach them all of the classic Halloween vocabulary (ie: trick-or-treat, haunted house, jack-o-lantern, witch etc). I myself now know how to say in Chinese haunted house, costume, pirate, viking, vampire and ghost, so you should be proud.


After that we get to play games. Games are always fun - I am a big fan, and so are the children. :) First we play Bingo, where I describe the Halloween word, and the students must put a piece of candy corn on the appropriate box (I would like to give a shout out to my mother who mailed me 20lbs of candy corn, after I mournfully told her that Taiwan did not carry the commodity - I tell all of my children about my amazing mother, and they all think she sounds awesome!). Then we play a guessing game, where all of the children have a piece of paper with different words clipped to their backs. They are also given a sheet of paper with a list of questions on it which they must use to find out which Halloween character they have on their back. So for instance, if they are a ghost, they must keep asking questions (Do I wear a hat? Do I play music? Am I black? Do I wear a crown?) until they find out what they are (Am I white? yes. Do I fly? yes. Am I a ghost? yes!). Last week, this game was super confusing and did not go well. I thought of scrapping it, but then the classes started understanding, and it turned out to be fun. I'm not sure if my classes this week are smarter, or whether I just figured out how to explain it more clearly...











I also gave all of the students leaf post-it notes. That is, I asked my academic director for red/orange/yellow/brown post-its in the shape of leaves for fall, and ended up with pink/green/yellow flower post-its... Not sure what happened there... Another thing I chalk up to cultural differences. The leaves don't change colors here, so the Taiwanese just don't understand. At any rate, the children were supposed to write their Chinese name, English name, class and a Halloween message on the leaves, and then tape them up on the windows. Now my windows are covered in lovely post-it notes from all 750 of my students, which makes me quite happy.


I made my room festive by drawing, cutting out and sticking up giant pumpkins all over my walls. I love fall; I love sweet corn festivals; I love apple orchards; I love pumpkin patches; I love pumpkin-flavored anything; I love raking leaves (though mostly just jumping into leaf piles...); I love the smell of everything which "fall" entails. Sadly, Taiwan has none of these things. They don't even have real pumpkins. They have miniature pumpkins, which are heart-breakingly miniature. So I cheered myself up by covering my walls in ginormous pumpkins. It took me several weeks to make all eight of the paper pumpkins, and I am pretty sure that everyone down in my office thought that I was a little nuts. Though, they probably did not need me to cut out pumpkins to provide evidence of my mild craziness...

On another Halloween note, I convinced my academic director (Tsuili) to have a school-wide costume competition on Thursday and Friday. I could tell that she was extremely dubious about my scheme, but like most other hair-brained ideas I come up with, she went along with it. We made fliers of myself dressed as a bunny, and then passed them out to teachers and posted them around the school. During the entire Halloween week, I myself dressed up every day in a different costume. On Monday, I was a tiger; Tuesday a bunny; Wednesday a tai ji master (I have the whole outfit since I do tai ji myself three days a week - yes, I do need a blog post about that... I wore my outfit with a long white beard, trying to emulate the "master" status - royally failed, for all of my students and the other teachers thought that I was trying to be Santa Claus! Now I ask you, what Santa Clause wears a black and white tai ji outfit?!!); and Thursday a princess. I had really wanted to be Cinderella, but alas, there is not a single Cinderella costume in all of Taiwan in my size. I had multiple Taiwanese friends scouring the island for me - calling their friends, searching online etc - and nothing turned up. We could not even find a passable blue skirt with which to be creative! So I had to settle for just being an ordinary princess. Anita (my co-teacher next semester) lent me a dress, which proved to make a perfect princess gown when paired with a tiara. I was kind of sad, though, that I did not have long white gloves. Not that I could have worn them here in the heat... But I diverge. Costume competition. For students - not me. :) A surprisingly large number of kids dressed-up! They had to come by the office in costume and shout out "trick-or-treat." Then we would give them candy and take their picture to be judged later. Results to be announced soon (as soon as I have time to look at the photos...).

Another exciting thing: I definitely got my principal to dress-up as a cowboy for Halloween! She is too funny.
To see more Halloween pics: http://picasaweb.google.com/gracejohnz/HalloweenAtMinghua#

This Month

So I have reached the conclusion that I am not a good blogger (what do I mean "reached"? I knew that already...). In order to have time to write, I would have to slow down from everything else that I am doing long enough to reflect and document. Somehow, I often see this as meaning that I will miss out on some other crazy new adventure. Alas, there are just not enough hours in the day. This month has been extremely busy, though of course, only in good ways. As I say, never invest your time in doing things which you do not thoroughly enjoy and always do everything you are doing to your utmost ability. Unfortunately, I enjoy too many things in life, and am therefore always over-committed and crazy busy, because I am giving my all to too many things simultaneously. While I love every minute of it and am extremely happy, there are certain things which fall by the wayside, such as blogs... My mother has now sent me multiple kindly-phrased emails asking when the next blog entry will be. I am afraid that if I postpone the inevitable writing too much longer, these messages will no longer be quite as nicely worded... So just for my mother, and anyone else who is interested, I will attempt to catch up with my life in writing. Since teaching is the main thing which I am doing over here, I will start with that.

School is endlessly amusing. I love teaching middle school. The kids are so adorable. They see me as some sort of super role model. Everywhere I go at school, I walk down the halls to shouts of "hello, Teacher!" or "Teacher, you are so beautiful!" Hilarious and endearing at first, but after a few months of this, when it happens multiple times every day, it gets a bit annoying. I often plan my trips around the school to not land between classes, so that there are fewer students in the hallway. Or I will try to plan my route from one side of the school to the other so as to avoid the highest number of students possible. Unlike American middle schools where the kids have passing period and all switch classes chaotically within a ten minute period, kids here stay with the same class throughout the entire day, and will move to different classrooms (such as art, music or PE) collectively. This means that I often run into an entire sea of students, where 40 13-year-olds are simultaneously shouting (yes, shouting) "hello, Teacher!" "Teacher, you are so beautiful!" Sometimes I make a game out of it. How far can I make it down the hallway before I break down and have to say hello to a student. It's all about eye contact. If I can seem preoccupied with something I am holding and not look up - but no - that never works, because children are still shouting at me from across the courtyard up on balconies.

I also seem to have turned into my school's mascot. They like to have me appear at random events, make speeches (oftentimes in Chinese - you can guess how well that goes...), greet students, take photos, be in photos... you get the general idea. So in the past week, I have made appearances at a special assembly for all of the 8th graders (Studio Classroom, an English-teaching drama group from Taipei, visited our school to give a presentation), the city-wide science fair for elementary and middle schools held at the Kaohsiung Science and Technology Museum, and a festival at Lotus Lake where over 30,000 Kaohsiung middle and high school students (300 went from Minghua) gathered to sing and dance simultaneously. The Studio Classroom was actually really fun. They used drama, dancing, singing, games, audience participation and a lot of Chinglish to teach the students English in a fun, engaging manner. I had a great time watching someone else stand on their heads to get through to my students. The best part was that the kids all seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Afterwards, I was introduced to the four troup members, three of whom were American. They were all very surprised and very impressed to find a bonafide American teaching at a school in the middle of southern Taiwan. Apparently, I was the first foreign teacher which they had ever found in a public school here (there are a good number of foreign teachers, but they all teach English in cram schools - the Fulbright program is the first program to bring foreign teachers into the public school system).

The science fair on Saturday was another amusing experience. I went, thinking that I was just going to take pictures for the newspaper and to bring one of my students (Lika - grew up in Australia, and only moved here to Taiwan a few years ago, so she has excellent English) to interview the science fair kids in order to write her article. Somehow though, Lika and I got roped into actually participating in the fair, going from one exhibit to the next, conducting science experiements. Picture me drawing Chinese characters upside down so that they reflect right-side up in a mirror (light refraction) or listening to a Chinese explanation for why magnetism works. And of course, I was the only foreigner in the entire museum, making me a great object of curiosity (why is the stray white girl at the science fair?). Every school wanted pictures of me testing out their science projects, which really weirded Lika. She asked me if this was a common occurrence, and I was like, "welcome to my world." At any rate, we did get pictures of the Minghua kids with their experiements, though I might be in more of those than not...

On Sunday, I met up at school with 300 Minghua seventh graders to be bussed over to Lotus Lake. Once again, I thought they would let me get away with just being present and taking pictures, but alas, I was roped into the dancing and was myself the object of much photography. The dancing bit was fun, but the multiple hours of lining up and waiting for the dancing to begin was not so much. It was incredibly hot (yes, it is nearly November and still near 100 degrees), and the process of assembling 30,000 students is not an easy one. Plus we had to wait for the mayor to ride out in a boat, circumferencing the entire lake so that she could wave to all of the various school groups, which took over 45 minutes. I spent most of the time by following my principal around. She is quite a character and very sweet. She knew the entire dance (which the students attempted to teach me in under five minutes once we arrived at the lake - I think I needed a bit more practice...) and danced it with great enthusiasm, or as the Taiwanese like to say - she was a "bright and passionate dancer!" ("passionate" is a favorite adjective here, though I am not sure why; it gets applied to just about everything).

Other notes of interest related to my school life, I have been working to start an English student newspaper entirely written and edited by my club students (of which the first issue will finally be published next week!!), organizing weekly English broadcasts, selecting poems for the eighth grade English poetry competition, leading a class to help teachers improve their English and initiating a pen-pal program between my two resource classes and an ESL class (for Latinos) in LA, California (therefore, both groups of students get to communicate in a foreign language with other kids their age halfway across the world - kind of cool, I think). It's all been a bit stressful, but also fun and rewarding.

Teacher's Day

The Taiwanese value their teachers so highly that they have created an entire national holiday just to celebrate them. I was forewarned that this day was approaching, but did not fully comprehend what all it entailed. Last Monday, I had cards, drinks and food showered upon me continuously throughout the day by my children. At the end, I took a picture of my desk. Everything you see, including the plant, was a gift. The only thing missing from this picture was a ginormous bouquet which I received a few minutes after my photo shoot. The bouquet had everything from gobs of tissue paper to candy to a little stuffed lamb sticking out of the middle.


The cards themselves were very precious. Here are some of my favorites:

"To - Grace.
Hi! I'm John, I'm a little teacher, you are a great teacher, you are very beautiful and funny, Happy Teacher's Day!
from - John." (John is a seventh grade teacher)

"Dear teacher ~ Grace
Happy Teacher's day!
class 202 wish you happy every day happy forever!
By 202 all students"

"Dear Teacher Grace
This is first time we write this card for you! We wish you are happy in Ming Hua!
Happy Teacher's Day!
Love You
Class 102
Happy Forever
Always Love"

"Dear Grace =
Thanks for teaching us for these past few weeks. At the beginning, I was pretty afraid to talk to a foreigner, but after the first time, I'm getting used to it. Thanks for helping me overcome my fears. It's really lucky to meet you and be your student.
HAPPY TEACHER'S DAY
THANK YOU FOREVER AND ALWAYS!!
214 Cindy"

Hakka Village

Tomorrow is the Autumn Festival, also called Moon Festival. I will be going out tonight with my host family to a barbecue, but thought that before I embarked on a new adventure, I should recount my last outing with them first.

Two weekends ago, my host family took me to Meinong, a traditional Hakka village about an hour northeast of Kaohsiung. Taiwan has several indigenous people groups who lived here several hundred years before the Han Chinese arrived with Chiang Kai-Shek following WWII. The Hakka are one of the larger indigenous groups (to give you an idea of how sizeable they are, here in Kaohsiung, the MRT announcements are given in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka and English), and there are two fairly famous Hakka villages close to Kaohsiung. However, the other one was hit very hard by the typhoon, and many of the roads and bridges have yet to be rebuilt. Therefore, we set off early in the morning Saturday for Meinong. Sunnie had also invited one of her friends, Nana (also a middle school English teacher), to join us for the day, so we made a happy foursome.

Sunnie is incredible and had created and printed off an intense itinerary for us for the day. The schedule was seven pages long with times for where we would be places along with descriptions of each famous site, both in Chinese and English, with accompaning pictures. However, despite her extreme organizational skills, the entire day felt very laid-back and relaxed - order and planning without stress or pressure. Shows you how amazing Sunnie is. :)

We started off the day by visiting a touristy villa where they make hand-painted oil paper umbrellas. These are very famous throughout Taiwan and are a trademark of the Hakka people. In Taiwanese/Chinese tradition, giving someone an umbrella as a gift is bad luck. For the Hakka, though, it is a symbol of affection and community. In Chinese, "oil paper" (you zhi - 油紙) sounds similar to "have children" (you zi - 有子). Therefore, parents always gifted their children with a oil paper umbrella when they were married. The umbrella stood for fulfillment, harmony, and the having of many descendants. Each umbrella is completely hand-made, from the bamboo structure, to the paper top. We watched one artist at work, painting a flower scene with butterflies. There are an endless amount of scenes which can be used, from bamboo trees and flowers to Chinese beauties (the women in traditional dress) to mountain views. The painter was incredibly fast, making bold strokes across the umbrella without once pausing or faltering. In order to be hired by the company to make the umbrellas, an individual must attend a specific school and apprentice under a master. The people working in the shop were eager to show me everything, even inviting me inside the roped off area so that I could get a better view and take more pictures.

We also walked to the second floor of the shop where another artist was making ceramics. A myriad of pottery and exquisite tea things were on display for sale. I would love to go back sometime, for they told us that anyone could pay to make their own ceramic mug and inscribe their own name on it, which sounded like a lot of fun.

Before we left the villa, I went back to purchase two of the paper umbrellas. They were so beautiful, and I simply could not resist! (they are now on display in our apartment) The sales lady told us that the umbrellas were very durable and would last for three years used out in the rain, but that it would be a bad idea to take them out in a typhoon. I love that it was necessary to tell me that a paper umbrella would be ruined in a typhoon... I am fairly certain mine will never be opened outdoors lol.

By the time we left, it was lunch time, so we went in search of a restaurant specializing in traditional Hakka food. Hakka food is known for its salty taste, grease and lingering smell. In fact, according to legend, each of these traits suggests something about Hakka culture. The food is salty in order to replenish the body's sodium levels depleted from excessive sweating during long days of hard labor in the fields; the food is greasy in order to make it more filling; and the food smells good in order to "open the appetite." I would attest to the food being all three of these things, particularly "greasy" (but honestly, all food is greasy in Taiwan...). Perhaps the most interesting dish presented to me was pig knuckle or pig foot. Delicious... Slash not... If you can get over the fact that you are eating something that looks like a pig's foot, you still have to deal with the meat being entirely fat. And I have yet to figure out how one manages to eat it using chop-sticks... Believe it or not, I have seen this dish two more times since Meinong. I am pondering the idea of beginning to tell Taiwanese people that I am just vegetarian (especially to avoid being forced to try such rare delicacies as chicken feet).

In the afternoon, we visited the Mainong Hakka Cultural Museum, the landmark East Gate and a famous ceramic arts museum. The cultural museum was actually really interesting. We had an excellent tour guide who walked around describing all of the exhibits to us, and Sunnie and Nana did a wonderful job translating for me. It was quite fascinating to learn all about the Hakka history and traditions.










The East Gate was built in 1755 as a watchtower for the town. Originally, Meinong was completely surrounded by walls and gates in order to protect against attacks. Today, the East Gate is the only part remaining. Many of the village's traditions and holidays today are centered around the gate. We scrambled to the top of the gate, up a very steep and narrow staircase that was in various stages of crumbling.














We ended our day at a ceramic arts museum where we peeked in at a huge warehouse studio, examined finished pieces in the salesroom and drank traditional Hakka tea and coffee. The studio belongs to one of the greatest ceramic artists in Taiwan, whose pieces decorate entire sides of skyscrapers, schools and train stations throughout Taiwan. The ceramics place was incredibly difficult to find, and poor Vincent became quite frustrated with himself after getting repeatedly lost. Considering that there were no road signs and that he was using a very undetailed google map, I thought he did a great job!

Weather and Appropriate Clothing Choices in Taiwan

This week had two firsts for me here in Taiwan.

On Monday, I wore long pants to school for the first time. This is epic. In case you do not realize the hugeness of this, you must realize that I have worn nothing but shorts, skirts and sundresses since arriving in Taiwan. For the past month, I have worn nothing but skirts and sundresses to teach in ever day. There was a time in my life when I enjoyed skirts and sundresses - a time when I thought that they were cute and fun. That time was July when I still lived in the US. Wearing skirts every day for two months straight will quickly dampen any girl's enthusiasm for that particular clothing item. You must understand that I was not wearing skirts for pleasure (though at first I did find it fun). No no - it was necessity. The weather here is mildly terrible. I would say that it is the only part of my life in Taiwan which I do not absolutely love (other than the food - oops did I just say that? a future blog entry must be dedicated to my lack of enthusiasm for Taiwanese food...). Imagine summer in Arizona, and then add in North Carolina July humidity times ten, and you might be in the same ball park of what the Taiwanese climate is like. Miserable. I walk outdoors, and sweat is instantly trickling down my back. I am perpetually sticky and gross. No amount of deodorant, hand-washing, showers or fans helps. And did I mention that no public schools in Kaohsiung are air-conditioned? That's right - none. So this has been my life for the past two months, and I finally reached the point where I could not - could not - wear a skirt for another consecutive day. Last week I went camping with my school in Tainan, which is up in the mountains, and therefore, marginally cooler. The slight decrease in temperature and humidity made it possible for me to wear jeans on one of the evenings. Not only was I wearing pants, but I was wearing denim! You cannot imagine my excitement. After that, I was ruined. Pants were going to happen in my life weather or not my body could physically handle it. Monday I wore dress pants for the first time to school. It was so much fun that I had to do it again on Tuesday. And then again on Wednesday. Oh joy, oh bliss. I love pants.

My other first this week happened Wednesday evening. I rode my scooter in heavy rain for the first time. I have been out in misting weather before but never heavy showers. In Taiwan, the majority of the population gets from point A to point B by scooter. Rain showers do not change this. Taiwanese people stoically don raincoats and ponchos and saunter forth with an absolute lack of concern for the inclement weather. However, since I had never been out in heavy rain before, I lacked the appropriate gear for such an occasion. Following our biweekly Wednesday afternoon Fulbright meeting with all of the ETAs and co-teachers, my co-teachers wanted to take me and a few other ETAs out for sushi. There was heavy drizzle when we left Sanmin, so we stopped in 7-11 in order for Carol (ETA) and I to buy rain ponchos. They only had the cheap disposable ones, but we figured it would not be a big deal since it was not actually raining that hard. Of course, as soon as we began driving, the heavy drizzle turned into a heavy downpour. I had rolled up my pants so that they fit underneath my rain pancho, but I had no way of protecting my shoes. For some reason, Anita and Carol (the two co-teachers I will be working with next semester) had picked a shushi place 20 MINUTES AWAY! So we were scootering 20 minutes through heavy rainfall. By the time we reached the sushi bar, my high heals were squishy with water, I could wring out a pint of water from my face mask (everyone wears face masks here while scootering to protect from breathing in all of the exhaust and fumes from heavy traffic), and Carol's (ETA) jeans were wet up to her mid-thigh. The best part was that we also got to scooter back all the way back to Sanmin for our Chinese class that evening. Sushi that evening was perhaps not my best life descision ever....

Katherine, Carol and I in our wimpy, disposable rain ponchos.

Carol, Anita and I - notice their much more durable raincoats.

On another weather note, I might be so lucky as to live through my second and third typhoons here in Taiwan in the coming week. Two are currently on a direct trajectory towards the island. One Taiwanese person told me yesterday to pray that it loops around to Japan instead lol. I just hope that it is not as destructive as the last one. Annnd I should probably invest in a descent rain poncho before the impending storm...